This sounds good, but I don't think it generally works. The problem is that the petty minded people are also the ones who don't have anything else to do with their time, so they can expend all their effort on being petty. Whereas the normal people have other things to do with their lives, and simply don't have the time to deal with all the pettiness, and if they end up on the board, they now don't have a choice: their lives are basically hostage to the petty people who keep taking up their time with bogus issues that can't just be ignored because the structure of the HOA requires some kind of response.